Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/14

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The persistence of Czarism in Russia after its historical necessity had ceased, its clinging to power after Capitalism had come into being, produced a dual political and social development. Within the shell of Czarism developed the bourgeoisie, the class of capitalists, and the proletariat,—a, mature and aggressive proletariat. As the bourgeoisie developed power, the proletariat simultaneously developed its own power, while politically and officially Czarism retained ascendancy. When the shell of Czarism was burst by revolutionary action, Czarism disappeared as easily as a dream upon awakening, in violent and suggestive contrast to the painful and prolonged struggles required to overthrow the absolute monarchy in France, and in England; and the failure of the revolutionary movement in Germany in 1848. This unparalleled rapidity of accomplishment in Russia was directly and largely traceable to the development of the revolutionary proletariat.

Upon the overthrow of Czarism, the bourgeoisie and proletariat faced each other in battle array; where previous revolutions found the proletariat scattered and without decisive power, the Russian Revolution found the proletariat disciplined and inspired by traditions of revolutionary struggle, organized by the mechanism of capitalist production itself,—stronger than the bourgeoisie, and able to conquer for itself the power of the state.

This emergence of the proletariat, its independent class policy and class organizations, the Soviets, constitutes the decisive feature of the Russian Revolution,—an emergence definite and sufficiently aggressive to conquer power for the revolutionary proletariat.

The emergence of the proletariat is not new in the Russian Revolution; it was latent and partially expressed in the French Revolution and other bourgeois revolutions. There were two tendencies in the French Revolution,—the bourgeois tendecytendency [sic], which directed itself to a gradual transformation of the political forms, willing to satisfy itself with a compromise with the monarchy, providing that bourgeois class interests became ascendant; and the tendency of the masses of the people, the workers and the poorer peasants, which directed itself to a complete destruction of feudalism and the monarchy, and struggled to develop an economic revolution through the organization of a communistic society. Again and again the bourgeoisie compromised and dickered with the monarchy, terrified at the revolutionary economic aspirations of the masses;